Archive for date:
June, 2010

Published on: Saturday, 26 June, 2010

A well timed lightning bolt

I was giving a talk in Bozeman, Montana, last night at an event
to celebrate the 30th anniversary ofPERC, a think tank that encourages private
approaches to wildlife conservation and free-market environmental
solutions.

Just as I uttered the words "of course, things will still go
wrong", there was a huge thunderclap, the lights went out and the
slide projector died.

Published on: Friday, 25 June, 2010

Ardipithecus is too interesting to fight over

I spent an afternoon this week getting a personal tour of a cast
of the skeleton of Ardipithecus from Tim White, the leader of the
team that decsribed it. Call me a nerd, but I found it
spine-tingling to hold in my hands the skull of a 4.4.million year
old creature that might be very close to my own ancestor.

But it was the details that stole the show. The lack of
sharpening on the rear of the canines (unlike a chimpanzee), the
flared pelvis of a regular biped, the curved but relative short
metatarsals of the foot, the hints of very little sexual
dimorphism.

The ecology, too, is intriguing. The Afar depression was not
such a depression then, and the weather was sufficiently damp for a
fairly rich forest to be growing there, albeit with patches of
grassland. By far the commonest antelopes were woodland-dwelling,
browsing kudu. Ardi herself ate fruits and nuts from trees, not
grasses -- this can be decided by isotopic analysis -- and she was
a good climber as well as a walker. Her molar teeth had not grown
robust like those of Lucy, for grinding grass seeds and roots, but
nor had they shrunk for processing soft fruit as those of modern
chimpanzees have.

Published on: Thursday, 24 June, 2010

A journalism prize to celebrate Frederic Bastiat

Frederic Bastiat's writings are full of brilliant rebukes
against the restriction of trade, and the curtailment of human
happiness such restrictions always bring. But it is in a discussion
around the state funding of the arts that Bastiat most
clearly articulates the pessimism behind the bureaucratic state and
the life-enhancing optimism of those who believe in human
freedom.

Our adversaries consider that an activity
which is neither aided by supplies, nor regulated by government, is
an activity destroyed. We think just the contrary. Their faith is
in the legislator, not in mankind; ours is in mankind, not in the
legislator.

The latest evidence for the rationality of such optimism can, of
course, be found in my book.

Published on: Tuesday, 22 June, 2010

Did war prevent the invention of trade in other species?

Nick Wade has a good piece in today's New York Times about
John Mitani's chronicling of warfare between troops of Chimpanzees
in Uganda.

Dr. Mitani's team has now put a
full picture together by following chimps on their patrols,
witnessing 18 fatal attacks over 10 years and establishing that the
warfare led to annexation of a neighbor's
territory.

The fact that male chimpanzees systematically and stealthily
patrol their boundaries in groups to kill neighbouring males has
been known for a long time in Gombe in Tanzania, but critics have
charged that it was unnaturally caused by human feeding of the
chimps. That now seems unlikely.

Published on: Monday, 21 June, 2010

Natural variations in ocean pH both in time and space dwarf human-induced trends.

Pertinent to my recent response to New Scientist on ocean
acidification, Willis Eschenbach has a fascinating piece at Wattsupwiththat on a study of ocean pH along a transect from Hawaii
to Alaska. Turns out that the further north you go, the less
alkaline the ocean:

As one goes from Hawaii to Alaska
the pH slowly decreases along the transect, dropping from 8.05 all
the way down to 7.65. This is a change in pH of almost half a
unit.

The study also measured the change caused by carbon dioxide from
industry:

Published on: Tuesday, 15 June, 2010

Corals under threat? Yes, but not much from either warming or acidification.

As part of an `interview' with me, New Scientist published
a critique by five scientists of two pages of my
book The Rational Optimist. Despite its tone, this critique only
confirms the accuracy of each of the statements in this section of
the book. After reading their critiques, I stand even more firmly
behind my conclusion that the threats to coral reefs from both
man-made warming and ocean acidification are unlikely to be severe,
rapid or urgent. In the case of acidification, this is underlined
by a recent paper, published since my book was written, summarising
the results of 372 papers and concluding that ocean acidification
`may not be the widespread problem conjured into the 21st century'.
The burden of proof is on those who see an urgent threat to corals
from warming and acidification. Here is what I wrote (in bold),
interspersed with summaries of the scientists' comments and my
replies.

Take coral reefs, which are
suffering horribly from pollution, silt, nutrient run-off and
fishing - especially the harvesting of herbivorous fishes that
otherwise keep reefs clean of algae. Yet environmentalists commonly
talk as if climate change is a far greater threat than these, and
they are cranking up the apocalyptic statements just as they did
wrongly about forests and acid rain

Andy Ridgwell says `I agree that at least for some reef systems,
other, and more local human factors such as fishing and pollution
may be the greater danger' and Jelle Bijma says `I do agree that,
for example, pollution and overfishing are also important problems,
some even more important than the current impact of ocean
acidification'. It was not therefore accurate of Liz Else to say
that the critics accuse me of failing `to recognize that there is
more to the health of corals than the amount of bicarbonate in the
sea' They do not - she has misrepresented their views and mine.

Published on: Tuesday, 15 June, 2010

Norman Macrae 1923-2010

When I joined the Economist in 1983, Norman Macrae was the
deputy editor. He died last week at the age of 87. Soon after I
joined the staff, a thing called a computer terminal appeared on my
desk and my electric typewriter disappeared. Around that time,
Norman wrote a long article that became a book about the future. It
was one of the strangest things I had ever read.

It had boundless optimism --

Over the last decade, I have
written many articles in The Economist and delivered lectures in
nearly 30 countries across the world saying the future should be
much more rosy. This book explores the lovely future people could
have if only all democrats made the right
decisions.

Published on: Thursday, 10 June, 2010

An attack on my book that gets it wrong

Update: now that I have seen the five
scientists' comments, I find that remarkably they support and
vindicate each one of my factual statements. I have posted a
detailed analysis in
a separate blog post.

Here's a letter I just sent to New Scientist:

In her misleading article about my book,
among other errors Liz Else wrongly states that I `failed to
recognize that there is more to the health of corals than the
amount of bicarbonate in the sea'. Yet I clearly state in my book:
`take coral reefs, which are suffering horribly from pollution,
silt, nutrient runoff and fishing'. After doing the interview, Else
asked me for proof of a statement in my book that `Even with
tripled bicarbonate concentrations, corals show a continuing
increase in both photosynthesis and calcification.' Presumably this
was because her unnamed `experts' had challenged this statement. I
was happy to supply her with the following extract from Craig
Idso's book (`CO2, global warming and coral reefs'), which I cited
in my book, and with the reference it cites (Herfort et al 2008.
Journal of Phycology 44: 91-98): `This work reveals that additions
of HCO3- to synthetic seawater continue to increase the
calcification rate of Porites porites until the bicarbonate
concentration exceeded three times that of seawater…Similar
experiments on Acropora species showed that calcification and
photosynthetic rates in these corals were enhanced to an even
greater extent, with calcification continuing to increase above a
quadrupling of the HCO3- concentration and photosynthesis
saturating at triple the concentration of seawater'. I am sorry
that instead of quoting this exchange between us, Else chose to
fall back on unsubstantiated accusations of `misconceptions,
selective reporting and failure to see the significance of
historical changes in ocean acidity'. I took the trouble to back up
my claims; she should have done so for her accusations.

Published on: Wednesday, 09 June, 2010

Forbidden fruit is tempting

I just read a wonderful book Hybrid: the history and science of plant
breeding by Noel Kingsbury.

It contains a charming story, of a Moravian priest called Father
Schreiber, who was more interested in horticulture than holiness,
and whose parish included Gregor Mendel's birthplace, Hyncice. As
Kingsbury tells the tale:

Schreiber also had to face opposition,
or at least suspicion, from a conservative peasantry. So in order
to distribute new fruit varieties, he and the countess [Maria
Walpurga Truchsess-Zeil, no less] developed a technique that has
been used more than once down the ages in order to bring new genes
to the countryside: subterfuge. A nursery for trees was established
and word put out that these valuable seedlings were under guard,
the guards being instructed to make a lot of noise if they heard
anybody but not to actually arrest anyone. In a matter of days, all
the seedlings had been stolen.

Published on: Thursday, 03 June, 2010

George Monbiot's attack on me in the Guardian is very misleading

George Monbiot's recent attack on me in the Guardian is
misleading. I do not hate the state. In fact, my views are much
more balanced than Monbiot's selective quotations imply. I argue
that the state's role in sometimes impeding or destroying the
process that generates prosperity needs to be recognised, as people
from enslaved ancient Egyptians to modern North Koreans could
testify. But as I mention in my book, I don't think that free
markets, especially those in assets, should be completely
unregulated. I do argue that free and fair commerce has the
power to raise living standards.

Unlike Monbiot's article, my book isn't about me. It's about the
billions of other people in the world who, through ingenuity,
exchange and specialisation, have generated remarkable
prosperity.

Monbiot, remember is the man who once wrote: ``every time someone dies as a
result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be
dragged out of his office and drowned.'' (see, George, two can play
at selective quotation).